Feruchemy × Surgebinding?

[Arsteel]

So, let's say you have a gold compounder, who is healed by either an Edgedancer or a Truthwatcher. Would it maybe be possible to absorb tonnes of Stormlight, use it to heal someone, and then have them store that healing in a Goldmind at just the right moment? This would then allow them to burn the Goldmind at any point (granting them an extra boost which I expect would make the healing greater than it originally would have been if just taken directly from the Stormlight), so the healing would be stored away safely for later use (as opposed to it slowly fading away in the form of Stormlight).

As Stormlight is easily accesible (at least if you are on Roshar) and the healing power gained from the Surge of Progression seems to be great, at least compared to just Feruchemical gold, this could be an interesting way of easily storing lots of healing, or maybe other Feruchemical attributes too. For example, what if you could Lash yourself through the air at great speeds and then stop yourself by storing that speed in a Steelmind? 

The basic idea is just to combine the large raw power of the Surges with Feruchemy, which directs and controls power well.

In my mind this works a little to well, so I might just have made it all up. I can see some things that might get in the way (at least with healing). For example, i don't think Radiants can heal somebody who don't percieve themselves as injured or sick. Could you bypass this by changing their/your Perception somehow?

Another problem could be that Surges don't count as attributes you can store, because they aren't seen as belonging to you but to the Stormlight itself?

Also, I didn't really do my research before writing this. It's likely all wild speculation, so please tell me what you think about combining Surgebinding and Feruchemy.

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

For your first example, with the gold compounder, I think it would definitely work. In fact, I think that's how most compounders do it in the first place. They store a little health in a small bit of gold, then burn that gold, and then re-store that compounded health in other metalminds for later usage. 

So the person wouldn't even have to have A-gold, just F-gold. If a Truthwatcher or Edgedancer heals the Feruchemist, the Feruchemist could store that extra healing in a metalmind, and then call upon it for later usage, with or without compounding involved. And I bet you could do it easily with other attributes, like speed, which was the other example you used.

I've been re-reading the original Mistborn trilogy, and based on the descriptions of Sazed using Feruchemy, it becomes increasingly obvious to me that there could be ways to... "cheat the system", so to speak. Meaning that there are ways (besides compounding) that you could take extra attributes given by Invested arts and store them Feruchemical.

For example, if you had a Radiant who was also a Bloodmaker, (gold Ferring), could they infuse themselves with Stormlight, then just store the healing that the Stormlight gives in their Goldmind for later usage? (Like you said above, that would be even more efficient if they were a compounder.)

I think Brandon Sanderson has these things in mind as he gets closer and closer to writing Era 4 and the Cosmere's space age. He probably has a lot of little tricks (and most likely some big ones, too) in store for when the magic systems begin to interact. It's possible that this might not work, because it would be too easy, and Brandon has made some other rule that prevents the "Feruchemy short-cut", so to speak. But it seems to me like this is something we'll see a lot of in the future.

Maybe the capabilities of Stormlight in regard to Feruchemy are why a certain Scadrian is trying so hard to get that Stormlight offworld....

Edited July 15, 2022 by The Bookwyrm

[Dunkum he/him]

1 hour ago, Arsteel said:

So, let's say you have a gold compounder, who is healed by either an Edgedancer or a Truthwatcher. Would it maybe be possible to absorb tonnes of Stormlight, use it to heal someone, and then have them store that healing in a Goldmind at just the right moment? This would then allow them to burn the Goldmind at any point (granting them an extra boost which I expect would make the healing greater than it originally would have been if just taken directly from the Stormlight), so the healing would be stored away safely for later use (as opposed to it slowly fading away in the form of Stormlight).

As Stormlight is easily accesible (at least if you are on Roshar) and the healing power gained from the Surge of Progression seems to be great, at least compared to just Feruchemical gold, this could be an interesting way of easily storing lots of healing, or maybe other Feruchemical attributes too. For example, what if you could Lash yourself through the air at great speeds and then stop yourself by storing that speed in a Steelmind? 

The basic idea is just to combine the large raw power of the Surges with Feruchemy, which directs and controls power well.

In my mind this works a little to well, so I might just have made it all up. I can see some things that might get in the way (at least with healing). For example, i don't think Radiants can heal somebody who don't percieve themselves as injured or sick. Could you bypass this by changing their/your Perception somehow?

Another problem could be that Surges don't count as attributes you can store, because they aren't seen as belonging to you but to the Stormlight itself?

Also, I didn't really do my research before writing this. It's likely all wild speculation, so please tell me what you think about combining Surgebinding and Feruchemy.

SO I think the healing thing would work, and as The Bookwyrm suggests, you wouldn't need a compounder, just someone with F-Gold to store as the stormlight enhanced healing comes in.  for your steel example though - that isn't how F-Steel works.  F-Steel stores physical speed - basically your ability to run or move fast, not the speed you are currently moving.  you can store speed while staying still

now, if you filled yourself up with stormlight, it does enhance your physical abilities, like strength and speed, and that enhanced strength or speed you could still store if you somehow had access to both surgebinding and ferruchemy.

you should also be able to store your ability to surgebind (possibly individual surges or maybe even individual lashings/lashing equivalents) if you have access to Feruchemical nicrosil

[+asmodeus]

There's... a little bit of a fallacy here.

Feruchemical gold does not store active healing. When you store in gold, feruchemically, what is happening is that you are storing your baseline level of health. This doesn't hurt you or make you sick; it makes you more likely to get sick, and slower to recover from being hurt. You being sick, or you not healing an injury or wound... these things are are not in itself a requirement for storing in gold, they are only side effects of storing in gold. So... if you're a feruchemist, and you start storing within gold, then cut yourself with a knife, and then someone with stormlight comes in and heals you, it will simply heal the wound, without really redirecting the flow into the metalmind. Those streams are not crossing, as they are both unrelated, even if similar, things.

But even by this logic, there are caveats, because not all wounds and sicknesses are the same. While feruchemically storing in gold, you might be more likely to get cancer from smoking, but... whether stormlight healing can heal this or not is a different case than healing something as obvious and sudden as a knife cut.

Now what stormlight healing would be good for, and how it can help feruchemically store in gold, is by making that storing safer. If you are a radiant, or if you have access to a radiant, then you suddenly have much more room to take the risk of massively reducing your baseline level of health and correspondingly increasing your passive rate of storing into gold. Becuase if you do catch something severe or something that's causing you discomfort or pain, or has a chance of having long-term consequences even beyond your temporary reduction in health while storing, then you can immediately heal that off. Heck, you could even go so far as to cause catastrophic failure in some part of you or another, leading heart attacks or liver failures or whatever, and then immediately heal yourself off of those things.

So it will help build up your gold stores significantly faster, just... more indirectly than crossing streams.

All of this holds afaik from what we know right now, but it's entirely possible Brandon just thinks this is a cool idea and throws this special interaction in as you say, because... "why not? It's cool!"

[Arsteel]

3 hours ago, asmodeus said:

There's... a little bit of a fallacy here.

Feruchemical gold does not store active healing. When you store in gold, feruchemically, what is happening is that you are storing your baseline level of health. This doesn't hurt you or make you sick; it makes you more likely to get sick, and slower to recover from being hurt. You being sick, or you not healing an injury or wound... these things are are not in itself a requirement for storing in gold, they are only side effects of storing in gold. So... if you're a feruchemist, and you start storing within gold, then cut yourself with a knife, and then someone with stormlight comes in and heals you, it will simply heal the wound, without really redirecting the flow into the metalmind. Those streams are not crossing, as they are both unrelated, even if similar, things.

But even by this logic, there are caveats, because not all wounds and sicknesses are the same. While feruchemically storing in gold, you might be more likely to get cancer from smoking, but... whether stormlight healing can heal this or not is a different case than healing something as obvious and sudden as a knife cut.

Now what stormlight healing would be good for, and how it can help feruchemically store in gold, is by making that storing safer. If you are a radiant, or if you have access to a radiant, then you suddenly have much more room to take the risk of massively reducing your baseline level of health and correspondingly increasing your passive rate of storing into gold. Becuase if you do catch something severe or something that's causing you discomfort or pain, or has a chance of having long-term consequences even beyond your temporary reduction in health while storing, then you can immediately heal that off. Heck, you could even go so far as to cause catastrophic failure in some part of you or another, leading heart attacks or liver failures or whatever, and then immediately heal yourself off of those things.

So it will help build up your gold stores significantly faster, just... more indirectly than crossing streams.

All of this holds afaik from what we know right now, but it's entirely possible Brandon just thinks this is a cool idea and throws this special interaction in as you say, because... "why not? It's cool!"

Thanks for making this clear. I'd been wondering if it would work this way too.

[Arsteel]

11 hours ago, Dunkum said:

for your steel example though - that isn't how F-Steel works.  F-Steel stores physical speed - basically your ability to run or move fast, not the speed you are currently moving.  you can store speed while staying still

Ah ok, thanks for clarifying. This is what I meant with "whether or not the speed you're moving at while lashing counts as your own speed". Maybe it could also be used similiarly to how asmodeus suggests for the healing: you can store the speed gained from the surge, but you could perhaps put all but a tiny amount of your speed in a Steelmind- so much that you could barely walk- and then remain mobile by using lashing to move yourself about.

[Arsteel]

13 hours ago, The Bookwyrm said:

Maybe the capabilities of Stormlight in regard to Feruchemy are why a certain Scadrian is trying so hard to get that Stormlight offworld....

Ooooh.... interesting.

And about the compounding: I know it's not necessary, I just added it to make it all even more stupidly OP.

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

2 hours ago, Arsteel said:

Maybe it could also be used similiarly to how asmodeus suggests for the healing: you can store the speed gained from the surge, but you could perhaps put all but a tiny amount of your speed in a Steelmind- so much that you could barely walk- and then remain mobile by using lashing to move yourself about.

This makes more sense to me.

If the whole "storing an unnatural trait granted by another magic system in a metalmind" doesn't work, than at least you can use those granted traits to cover for you while you store your normal ones. Maybe a Radiant-Feruchemist could be storing strength or health, but then instead of having to deal with that temporary lack, they could just use Stormlight to balance it out and give them normal functions while they store their attributes. They don't gain any extra benefit from the Stormlight at that moment, but it lets them function easier and still get the metalminds filled.

You could also have them fill a Cadmiummind while using Stormlight. Cadmium stores breath, so that while storing, the Feruchemist (or Gasper, as the Ferring is called in this case) needs to Hyperventilate, but then is able to go without breathing for long amounts of time when tapping. Stormlight also allows the user to go without breathing. So using stormlight while storing breath in Cadmium would be helpful.

Another example (that uses only magics in the Metallic Arts) is storing speed while inside a Bendalloy bubble, which makes it so you don't really loose speed or time relative to everyone around you. There are probably a ton of other shortcuts like this. Even if you can't directly mix the magic systems, there are still things you can do to make it so you don't really loose the attribute while storing it, because it's being re-granted by another magic.

[Arsteel]

4 hours ago, The Bookwyrm said:

This makes more sense to me.

If the whole "storing an unnatural trait granted by another magic system in a metalmind" doesn't work, than at least you can use those granted traits to cover for you while you store your normal ones. Maybe a Radiant-Feruchemist could be storing strength or health, but then instead of having to deal with that temporary lack, they could just use Stormlight to balance it out and give them normal functions while they store their attributes. They don't gain any extra benefit from the Stormlight at that moment, but it lets them function easier and still get the metalminds filled.

You could also have them fill a Cadmiummind while using Stormlight. Cadmium stores breath, so that while storing, the Feruchemist (or Gasper, as the Ferring is called in this case) needs to Hyperventilate, but then is able to go without breathing for long amounts of time when tapping. Stormlight also allows the user to go without breathing. So using stormlight while storing breath in Cadmium would be helpful.

Another example (that uses only magics in the Metallic Arts) is storing speed while inside a Bendalloy bubble, which makes it so you don't really loose speed or time relative to everyone around you. There are probably a ton of other shortcuts like this. Even if you can't directly mix the magic systems, there are still things you can do to make it so you don't really loose the attribute while storing it, because it's being re-granted by another magic.

Yes, exactly! The Cadmium example is also very interesting. Also, with using stormlight to balance strength/wakefullness storing, it's like you're basically able to stow the power granted by Stormlight away for later, instead of being pressed for time to use it before it leaves you/your spheres.

[Trusk'our he/him]

I think that if a gold Ferring or full Feruchemist were to receive a boost of healing from the Surge of Progression, they would be able to store that for later use.

I don't think that the Surge of Gravitation would allow someone to store extra physical speed in a Metalmind though; Feruchemical iron would be more likely to have important interactions with the Surge of Gravitation. 

I think another way that a gold Ferring might be able to hack the system and gain extra healing stored away would be to get some Bio-Chromatic Breaths and store the extra health they get from the Heightenings. Divine Breath healings might also be able to be stored if done at just the right moment. 

It also may be possible for an Allomantic pewter/Feruchemical gold twinborn to store the accelerated healing they get from burning pewter in a Goldmind. 

So basically, I think that any form of healing that a gold Ferring gets could potentially be stored for later use.